Digit

I am a calendar, but I come without numbers. You make those yourself. Marble and stone triangles find their way onto my magnetic grid, building numerals the way a digital clock does — only slower, and much more satisfying. There are days. There are months. There are also a few triangles with no job at all. That’s fine. They’re waiting for you to give them one.

Creator’s Notes

We wanted to indulge in building small, simple triangular compositions every day. The digital clock gave us the language: blocky, segmented numerals we’ve all grown up reading.

The ‘corner’ on the front face is built in wood marquetry, laid triangle by triangle. Each of its three faces uses woods chosen for their tone, so light seems to fall differently on each side: one bright, one in half-shade, one in shadow. Look at it straight on and it reads as the corner of a box pushing out towards you. It isn’t. It’s a cavity, folding inward. Beneath the two layers of wood sits a mild steel sheet that makes the surface magnetic.

Each stone triangle is a sandwich: a magnet set between two slices of colourful stone, bonded together and usable on both sides. Getting enough pull through stone and wood, while keeping the magnet entirely hidden, was a reach. What we were chasing was the snap, that small, decisive click when stone meets wood. It took us longer to get there than we’d like to admit.

This is a collectible in the truest sense, with many materials coming together. There was no precedent for a ‘calendar’ like this, so we invented everything from scratch, one prototype at a time (we went through five or six before we got here).

We wanted to celebrate these glorious colours and bring stunning stones and woods into everyday life.

Materials

Corner: teakwood, shirish wood, shisham, sevan wood, maple wood, badaami wood, purpleheart wood, mild steel

Stone triangles:

Green Kesariyaji marble, white Makrana marble, red sandstone, yellow sandstone, black Kadappa stone, pink Makrana marble, Katni stone, lapis lazuli, green jade, Ghazni stone, grey Kota stone, yellow jasper

Dimensions (L × B × H)

105 × 105 × 145 mm

Total pieces

1 wooden corner, 26 white and green stone triangles, 4 triangles in assorted colours for the days of the week, 6 red and yellow stone triangles for the months of the year

Instructions for use

Place my triangular magnetic pieces onto my grid to build the numerals for the current date. Move the pieces around by hand as the days and months change.

My extra triangles are yours to play with. Arrange them into shapes on me, stack them beside me, or use them however you like.

Turn me around to use my reverse side as a magnetic pinboard for notes, photographs and reminders.